Advent is a privileged time of the Church year. In order to emphasize Advent as a time of preparation for Christmas, there are very few obligatory saints’ feasts on Advent weekdays, which means those who are remembered are really important to the Church Universal. The first example of such a saint is on Dec. 3: St. Francis Xavier.

St. Francis Xavier (1506-1552) was one of the first generation of Jesuits, who knew St. Ignatius Loyola. St. Francis Xavier stands out as the “apostle of Asia.”

Born in northern Spain, St. Francis Xavier was educated in that country before he went to continue his studies in Paris, where he met Ignatius, who turned his focus to more spiritual pursuits. After finishing his studies, he spent some time as a teacher and then later attending to the sick in Venice. In 1537 he was ordained along with St. Ignatius Loyola.

The new Jesuit order was undergoing approval in Rome in 1539-40, but the King of Portugal was already asking for missionaries to be commissioned for the evangelization of the East Indies. St. Ignatius dispatched Francis Xavier.

(Recall your history of the Age of Discovery. When the Turks closed the overland spice route from Asia, Portugal and Spain initially competed to find a maritime route to the Indies. Portugal did so first, inching around Africa until it eventually sailed across the Indian Ocean to India itself. Spain, under Ferdinand and Isabella, engaged a Genoese sailor named Christoper Columbus who thought he could circumnavigate the world and reach the Indies. Unfortunately, he didn’t know two continents were blocking the way, which is why he initially thought the West Indies were the East Indies.)

From 1541 until his death in 1552, St. Francis Xavier traversed huge swaths of Asia and evangelized many peoples. He can justly be called the “St. Paul” of Asia.

He began in India, arriving in Goa in 1542. Goa became the base of Portuguese (and Francis Xavier’s) operations on the Indian subcontinent, a Catholic enclave that remained Portuguese territory until 1961, when it was forcibly annexed by India.

St. Francis Xavier traveled around the western Indian subcontinent and adjacent islands, including Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon). As new Jesuits arrived, he left them in charge of communities he established as he moved on. By 1545, he traveled eastward, spreading the Gospel in what today we call Malaysia. (There is a tradition that claims St. Francis Xavier also visited the Philippines, though that is disputed).

In Malaysia, St. Francis Xavier met a Japanese who interested him in that island nation and, from 1549-52 was involved in spreading the Gospel there. The year 1552 found him back in Goa.

St. Francis Xavier’s ultimate dream proved beyond reach. In 1552 he again set sail east, destination China. He never got there. Opposition dogged him and the rigors of the past decade took their toll. As he grew sicker at sea, his ship landed at what today is called Shangchuan Island, located off the Chinese coast and southwest of present-day Macao and Hong Kong. There, they built a simple hut for the saint, where he died. They brought his body back to Goa, where it remains to this day. He was canonized in 1622. In 1927, he was declared patron of the missions.

The saint’s journeys in some ways mirrored the expansion of Portuguese influence in Asia. Unlike South America (Brazil) or Africa (Cape Verde, Guinea, Angola, Mozambique) where the Portuguese eventually established large colonies (staying in Africa into the 1970s), their exploits in Asia were more limited to smaller coastal colonial trading posts (Goa and Macao). Macao would not come under greater Portuguese control until five years after Francis’ death, and would remain so until 1999.

In many ways China — whose name “Zhongguo” (中國) means “Middle Kingdom” — considered itself the most advanced and civilized country in East Asia, with a history going back before the time of Christ. Convinced of its cultural superiority, China in many ways remained closed to external/Western influences, an isolation that in practice lasted until the 19th century (“the century of humiliation”) when European colonial states and Japan carved up Chinese territory, especially on the coast. Even had death not overtaken him, St. Francis Xavier likely would have found China his toughest nut to crack: consider that his fellow Jesuit, Matteo Ricci, born the year Francis died and arriving 30 years later in Macao, found the process of getting into and then gaining trust in China long and arduous, taking almost three decades of his life.

Of all the regions of the world, the Church’s presence is lightest where the human population is greatest, in south and east Asia. Without defending the current Vatican’s Ostpolitik with Communist China, Catholic penetration of that part of the world remains a great field of evangelization. One can compare the Church’s freedom and spread in Taiwan to the mainland, but even on that island, Catholicism has much ground to cover. The St. Paul of Asia recognized what remains true in our day: “The harvest is great, the laborers few.”

Our saint is depicted in art by the 18th-century Spanish Romantic painter, Francisco de Goya. “La Muerte de San Francisco Javier” was painted in oil sometime between 1771 and 1774 and today is in the Zaragoza Museum in Spain.

St. Francis Xavier is shown lying on the ground, dressed in a black cassock that was the typical Jesuit habit. In his hands he holds a cross on which his gaze is fixed, again typical in hagiography of the Christocentric focus of the Jesuits. His gaze is focused upward. Above the branches of the ramshackle hut covering him wait two angels with a palm of victory, ready for that barrier to resolve and to take Francis to his real home. On the right of the painting, two ships depart, symbolizing both the end of Francis’ earthly life and that they do not carry him to his true home. They go into clouds, whereas the breakthrough sun and light is adjacent to the angels, where the real opening of heaven hangs above them.

[For more on St. Francis Xavier, see here, here and here.]